Lone Workers
By David Lynes
As the way we work, where we work and how we work is forever changing, we are seeing a certain swing away from office based jobs and into people working alone, either by working from home or as part of a company that employs workers to go out and work remotely.
There are a number of areas whereby this type of work is now becoming the norm, for example cleaning industries, homecare workers, security guards to name but a few. In a lot of cases, whether due to cost implications and the need to tighten belts a lot of these employees are now working alone.
As an employer, there is a certain degree of responsibility to ensure the safety of these workers and there are certain considerations particularly where the employee will be working in an environment that could potentially hold certain elements of risk.
A big part of ensuring their safety and reducing the risks involved is through the easy implementation of a time and attendance system.
Initial perceptions of these systems are that they are simply in place to track the attendance of your workers. However, they can be utilised in many other ways, not least in providing a safety aspect for lone workers.
So how does it work? These systems have the built in capacity for indefinite schedules to be loaded against each employee, clearly showing a scheduled arrival time and a scheduled departure time.
Once these schedules are in place, then there is the facility to set up alerting options, either through an email account or by a mobile text messaging service, whereby, the non arrival or indeed the lack of departure of your lone worker can be monitored and then subsequently the system can alert a supervisor or other designated person to the failure of employee to turn up where they should be.
In the vast majority of cases, the alerts will no doubt just be precautionary and the employee is probably just caught up in traffic or has slightly run over their allocated hours.
However, for the one time where the risks being faced may have become a reality, it will allow for quick action to be able to be taken and therefore result in your employee being quickly attended to and helped in whatever manner needed.
This can then provide both you and your employees with the peace of mind that whenever and wherever the job may take them, someone, somewhere knows where they are and knows they are safe.
Unique IQ have developed IQTimecard, Time and Attendance solutions for companies across the UK. Please visit www.iqtimecard.uniqueiq.co.uk for more information.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/6121245
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